


see hope rise with the tide

by Origamidragons



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon, sun pirates - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26710426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Origamidragons/pseuds/Origamidragons
Summary: “If you’re looking for Arlong, he’s inside,” she says, pointing at the monstrous building. Jinbe doesn’t look away from her, from the bruise over her eye. She can’t be older than thirteen or fourteen. Her fingers are worn red and raw. As he watches, a drop of blood drips to the ground.A girl, with reddish hair and exhausted eyes and a ragged, forced smile, and it’s Koala but it’s not.(Jinbe goes to check in on his brother, and finds some things that need to be set right.)
Relationships: Jinbei & Arlong (One Piece), Jinbei & Nami (One Piece)
Comments: 46
Kudos: 527
Collections: Excellent Completed Gen & Platonic Fiction





	see hope rise with the tide

**Author's Note:**

> _I'll watch fear fall with the sunset_  
>  _And see hope rise with the tide_  
>  _And when the pain is true_  
>  _Sometimes these troubles prove that I'm alive_  
>  \- [moving forward](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMioT5A-5xM), colony house

“It’s too quiet,” Aladine says, and he’s right. 

Cocoyashi Village is too quiet. 

It’s a port village on a midsized island. It should be bustling with life, or at least populated; there should be trading ships in the bay, citizens walking the streets. Instead, it may as well be a ghost town. The Sun Pirates’ ship is the only one visible all along the coastline, and only the occasional hints of movement visible through closed windows give away that anyone lives here at all. All the shades are drawn. 

There is something sinking, slow and heavy, in Jinbe’s chest.

“Are you sure you want to go alone?” Aladine asks, his voice unreadable. 

Jinbe hadn’t planned on coming here for a confrontation. He hadn’t _planned_ on much of anything at all, really. He’d only come in the first place because he’d happened across Arlong’s latest wanted poster in the paper and been struck by- something. Curiosity? Concern? 

(Fear?)

Now, though, looking at the shuttered windows and the barren streets, he doesn’t know anymore. He doesn’t _want_ to know what happened here, not really, but his life has rarely been a matter of what he _wants_. 

“I am,” he says, stepping down onto the shore, and it comes out as a sigh. “I shouldn’t be long.” 

Whatever he finds here, he knows, will be his responsibility. 

The walk through Cocoyashi’s silent streets feels longer than it is, and every footstep against the dirt roads is too loud in the dead quiet. He catches flickers of movement, now and then, through windows and doors. There are people in this town- many of them, even. And they’re all hiding. From him. 

JInbe’s visited many human cities and towns, all up and down the Grand Line. He’s been met with disgust, with scorn, with stony indifference, and weathered them all, but none hold a _candle_ to the kind of frozen terror that grips this town. It’s a relief when he leaves the silent houses behind, even though he can still feel the eyes on his back. 

With every footstep he draws nearer to the too-familiar tower, looming over the landscape, and with every footstep he wonders. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting to find when he reaches the concrete walls that surround Arlong’s compound, doesn’t know what he’s expecting to find when he steps through the open gates. 

What he finds is a child. 

The girl is underfed and rangy, short orange hair unwashed and skirt torn. There’s a bruise rising over one of her eyes, livid and purple. She freezes when she notices him, and he sees her eyes flicker to the brand on his chest and linger there for a heartbeat before she smiles, horrible and empty, and he _knows that smile_. 

“If you’re looking for Arlong, he’s inside,” she says, pointing at the monstrous building. Jinbe doesn’t look away from her, from the bruise over her eye. She can’t be older than thirteen or fourteen. Her fingers are worn red and raw. As he watches, a drop of blood drips to the ground. 

A girl, with reddish hair and exhausted eyes and a ragged, forced smile, and it’s Koala but it’s not. 

“What happened to your hands?” he asks, and it comes out too loud, too angry.

She flinches almost unnoticeably, tucks her arms behind her back and takes a step back. The little spot of blood is still far too red against the flat grey concrete. “Nothing.” 

He swallows back the rage that wants to come; he’s not angry at her, but she doesn’t know that, he has to remember she doesn’t know that. He tries to remember what had worked with Koala, instead: slow movements, soft words. 

He kneels down, slow as he can make it, bringing himself down to her level. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he promises, and the words taste bitter and ashy in his mouth. “What’s your name?” 

“…Nami,” she says after a long beat. She’s watching him like she doesn’t know what to make of him, like she’s waiting for the trap. For the _blow_ , he realizes after a moment, and something _twists_ in his stomach. 

“Nami,” he says, “I’m Jinbe.” And again, “I’m not going to hurt you. How old are you?” 

“Thirteen,” she says, quieter. Younger than Koala must be, now. 

He nods. “And what’re you doing here?” 

She hesitates for a moment, and then she tugs her arm around to show him her shoulder, and the ground drops out from under him. The same sharp-edged sigil flying from Arlong’s tower is written on her skin in hard, cruel lines of ink, and Jinbe knows a brand when he sees one, and he is going to be _sick_. 

“I’m a member of Arlong’s crew,” she says, and she’s still smiling but her voice is shaky like she’s about to cry. “I’m his mapmaker.” 

It’s Koala but it’s not because it’s _so much worse_ \- 

“Oh,” he says. “Oh.” 

-because _this is his fault._

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s not nearly enough, it’ll never be enough- “I’m _so_ sorry.” 

She’s still staring at him, but she isn’t smiling anymore, and that’s better, he thinks. 

“You’re safe now, alright?” he says, and tries to keep his voice gentle through the fury boiling in his chest, because she deserves that much at least. He’s never been good at gentle, not truly, but right now he cannot be anything less. “I promise. Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore.” 

“Is,” she says, and then swallows hard, and edges a step away from him. “That’s not fair.” 

It’s true, he knows, but not in the way she means it; she’s thirteen, and there’s a brand on her shoulder and her fingers are bleeding and her eyes are heavy with mistrust, and none of this is fair. “I’m not trying to trick you,” he says. “Arlong is my responsibility. I’m sorry I didn’t come here to put an end to this sooner.” 

There’s something breaking in her eyes, in the twist of her mouth. “You-?” 

“I’m sorry,” Jinbe says again, because there’s nothing else to say. 

“I- the village,” she says, voice sharpening, going half-desperate, throwing caution to the wind. “He’s gonna, he’s gonna hurt them, if he gets mad, he’s gonna hurt my _sister_ -”

(Not _me_ , not a single thought of _he’ll hurt me, if you anger him_ ; only _the village,_ only _my sister,_ and Jinbe’s heart breaks and breaks and breaks.) 

“He won’t,” Jinbe says, because looking at her, now, he knows he’ll die before he lets that happen. “I _swear_ on my life I won’t let him.” 

Something crumples in her face, then, and her shoulders start to tremble, and then she’s sobbing like the child she is, rubbing at her eyes with raw and bloody hands as fat tears roll down her cheeks and splatter to the concrete. She cries like Koala used to, like she’s desperately trying to swallow back her tears, keep herself quiet, keep herself safe. 

Jinbe’s hands twitch at his sides, because- he should do something, say something, but he doesn’t want to make this any worse. He doesn’t want to hurt her any more. There’s nothing he can do but wait until she cries herself dry, and he can do that much for her, at least. 

And then the doors of Arlong Park crash open, and a voice, sharp and slithering and all-too-familiar, snarls, “What’s that _fucking racket_ , Nami?” 

Nami’s whole body tenses up all at once, and she claps her hands to her mouth as if to silence herself. Arlong- older, angrier, but still so recognizably Jinbe’s little brother that it _hurts_ \- stomps out of his wretched palace, and Jinbe immediately steps sideways to place himself between him and Nami, shielding her at his back. 

The sky is clouded over, and Nami is still choking on tears behind him, muffled and broken, and the flag overhead snaps in the wind, and Jinbe _hates_. 

Arlong’s eyes land on him. They widen.

“Jinbe?” he says. 

“Arlong,” Jinbe replies, and lets all of the rage that he’s been struggling to contain throughout his conversation with Nami bubble up and over into his voice, lets it fill his eyes with lightning. “ _Explain yourself._ ”

Jinbe came here hoping he wouldn’t have to fight his brother, and now he might have to kill him. 

A flicker-flash of something that might be fear crosses Arlong’s face; he’s seen Jinbe angry before, many times, perhaps more than anyone else still living, but this is different. They both know it’s different. Did Arlong put that bruise over her eye, he wonders, or did he just not stop whoever did? Did he laugh? 

Arlong’s face hardens, after a moment. “What’s there to explain?” he snaps back, defiant as he’s always been. “ _I’ve_ built a place where our brothers can live in the sun as they deserve. What are _you_ going here? What have _you_ accomplished? Come crawling back to join me, finally?” 

“Did you hit her?” Jinbe asks, and his voice is so flat and cold with fury he barely recognizes it. 

Arlong blinks, looking momentarily wrong-footed. “What?” 

“Nami,” Jinbe clarifies, acutely conscious of her ragged, hiccuping breathing at his back. “Were you the one who hit her? You always did think it was _funny,_ with Koala.” 

Arlong stares at him for a moment, and then he laughs, and it should be familiar but instead it’s just grating. “Is _that_ what you’re so upset about? _Nami?_ ” He stops laughing, but he’s still grinning. “She’s my crew, Jinbe. I’ll treat her how I want. She chose to join up herself. She’s a _brilliant_ cartographer.” 

“She’s a _child_ , Arlong!” Jinbe is shouting, now, couldn’t stop himself if he tried, and he can see other faces in the doors, in the windows, drawn by the noise. Some of them he knows, has sailed with, fought with, laughed with. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to look any of them in the eyes again. “You _branded_ a _child!_ ” 

“A _human_ child,” Arlong sneers, his voice thick with disdain, with hatred, and Jinbe takes two strides forward and punches him into the ground hard enough to shatter the concrete. Behind him, Nami makes a tiny, shocked noise. 

For a moment, the plaza is silent, but for Jinbe’s heavy breathing and the sound of Arlong spitting gravel. Arlong lifts his head, slow and painful, and Jinbe doesn’t flinch from the seething betrayal in his eyes. 

“So that’s how it is?” Arlong hisses, clawing himself to his feet, spitting blood, red red red as the blood dripping from Nami’s fingers. “ _Traitor_. You’d side with the human _filth_ over your own brother?” 

“You betrayed _everything Fisher Tiger stood for_ ,” Jinbe snarls. “And you call _me_ the traitor?” 

“They killed him!” Arlong howls, and the old pain in his voice is something Jinbe knows well, something he’s carried in his chest for years. “ _She_ killed him!” 

“She is _innocent!_ ” 

“She’s _filth_ , and she’s _mine_ , and I’ll do _whatever I want_ with her!” Arlong bites out. 

And Jinbe knows, he knows, he _knows_ what happens when people become things, because he’s known Tiger, Koala, Aladine. He’s seen that damage, sat up at night hearing the echoes of those nightmares. 

“You sound like the _Dragons_ ,” Jinbe snarls out, all the disgust of the revelation in his voice. “Tiger would be _sick_.” 

He sees the words hit, because Arlong’s eyes widen, just for a moment, before they harden again, defiant to the last, and maybe there is no saving him, not anymore. Maybe everything that was good in Jinbe’s brother died when Fisher Tiger did, and he doesn’t know this person he’s facing now at all. But that’s wrong, too, he knows it’s wrong; the truth he has to face is that maybe Arlong has always been this, and Jinbe has always been blind. 

Arlong bares his bloodied teeth and lunges, and Jinbe’s fist and all the grief and guilt and rage behind it catch him in the chest. Bones crack, and blood splatters, and Arlong hits the wall with a shattering _crunch._

This time, he doesn’t get up. 

Quiet falls.

Arlong’s crew are all present now, drawn out by the crashing sounds of the fight, faces Jinbe knows and faces he doesn’t. They’re all watching him with wide eyes, expressions that range from shock to fear to anger. None move, so Jinbe ignores them for the moment. He’ll need to deal with them, he knows, and he will, and with Arlong, too, but there is someone more important than both, first. 

He turns to Nami. 

She’s still frozen in place, staring past him, bloody fists clenched at her sides, lips parted, eyes fixed unmoving and unblinking on Arlong’s still form. “Nami,” he says. She doesn’t respond. 

“Nami,” he says again, and it’s a moment before she can tear her eyes away to glance up at him. “Do you live here?” 

She stares at him for a moment before she seems to find her voice. “I- I have a room,” she manages, and she sounds so _young_. “…It’s not home.” 

“Alright,” he says. The anger, as fast and chokingly intense as it had come, is ebbing away just as suddenly in the face of the shell-shock in her eyes, leaving only tired old grief. “Why don’t you go collect your things, and then I’ll take you home, wherever that is.” 

For a moment she looks like she’s going to cry again. “…Okay.” 

“Do you want me to come with you?” 

She shakes her head, and swipes at her eyes, and then hurries across the plaza to the doors of Arlong Park. She pauses, for a moment, as she passes Arlong’s body. As Jinbe watches, she spits on his face, murmurs something he can’t make out before ducking through the open doors. The watching fishmen let her pass without a word; they’ll do nothing, he knows, with him watching them. 

Jinbe is already so _tired_ , wrung out and exhausted by anger and grief, but his duties are not over yet. (Sometimes it seems like they never will be.) 

“You’re going to leave this island,” he tells Arlong’s crew, and he’s not shouting anymore, but his voice echoes across the silent plaza nonetheless, heavy with the disappointment he knows cuts worse than knives. Even if he doesn’t know all of them, they all know who he is, and they know now where he stands, and his words have weight. “Leave Arlong for me to deal with. I don’t care what you do from here, but never come near here ever again.” 

He sees Chuu, Kuroobi, Hachi. They were there for Tiger’s death, all of them. His crewmates, once; his brothers, once.

“You should be better than this,” he says, and thinks about the blood on Nami’s fingers and the brand on her shoulder, and feels nothing but tired and angry and sad. “ _We need_ to be better than this.” 

Nami isn’t inside for long. She emerges a few minutes later, with nothing but a small bag over her shoulder and a carefully-folded piece of paper clutched tightly in her hand, and hurries to Jinbe’s side like she wants to put as much distance between herself and the monstrous building as possible. It warms something in his hurting chest, that she sees him as safe.

“Ready to go?” he asks her.

She’s still staring at Arlong’s prone body like she can’t process it, but she nods, jerky and uneven, and so he sets a careful hand on her narrow shoulder and guides her away through the gates. She’s so _small_. Jinbe has been cruel before, in his life, cruel and brutal, and he isn’t proud of it, but there’s a world of difference between brutality in combat and the kind of cruelty that darkens a child’s eye. 

They leave Arlong Park behind, and the tension doesn’t start to run out of her shoulders until the road has risen up behind them and the high concrete walls are out of sight. 

“What’s going to happen to him?” she asks after a long, long moment. Her voice is raspy from crying. 

“I’ll drop him at a marine base,” Jinbe says, and the betrayal in the words cuts like glass, but the alternative is to kill Arlong himself, and even after everything, he’s still not brave enough for that. “From there, he’ll either be sent to Impel Down or executed.” 

She swallows, nods, staring down at the dirt road. “ _Good_ ,” she says, and the anger in her voice is something he knows down to his bones. And then, after a beat, more tentative: “…He said you were his brother.” 

“He is,” Jinbe says, and it comes out as a sigh, because even after everything, Arlong is still his brother and always will be. “He was my crewmate, too, once.” 

She’s quiet, and then, “I have a sister. Nojiko.” 

He remembers. _He’s gonna hurt my sister_ \- “Older or younger?” 

“Older. She’s fifteen.” 

“She must be worried, hm?” he says. “Older siblings always worry.” 

She laughs, a little, and it’s a ragged, guilty sound, but it’s a laugh, and that’s a victory, if only a small one. “She does. All the time. She tries to act like she doesn’t.”

He should have come sooner. He can’t stop thinking about it, about what might have been avoided if he had. He’d wanted so badly to think the best of Arlong, to believe whatever he was doing couldn’t have been too bad, not when he’d borne witness to Tiger’s last moments, not when he’d had Hachi and the others with him, not when he was still Jinbe’s little brother. 

Older siblings always worry. He should have worried more. If he had, maybe Nami’s sister wouldn’t have had to.

They reach a fork in the road, the main path continuing on towards the town while a smaller, less well-worn trail branches off towards the coast, and Nami stops. 

“Nami?” 

“Can we,” she says, and swallows, “before we go back to Cocoyashi. Can we go somewhere else, first?” 

“Of course,” he says, and she steps off the road and leads the way down the trail. It twists and winds its way through a copse of trees and up a low rise of hill, and Nami ducks the low branches and steps over the roots like she’s made this trek a thousand times before. 

The path emerges onto a cliff, overlooking the ocean, and on the cliff there is a grave. 

Jinbe thinks, _oh_ , and does not follow past the tree line. This is something he will not intrude upon. 

Nami takes a few steps more, and then falls gracelessly to her knees before the rough wooden cross. She digs her abused fingers into the grass, bows her head. Tears fall, glittering in the sunlight, splattering to the ground below. 

“Bellemere-san,” she says, and she’s smiling, and it’s _real_ , the first real smile he’s seen from her, and that alone is worth all the pain and grief and fury weighing on Jinbe’s shoulders. “Bellemere-san, it’s over. It’s over. It’s-” 

She cuts herself off, sniffling, and wipes her eyes, and she’s smiling, and it’s _real_. 

“I’m _free_.” 

**Author's Note:**

> my friend suggested 'jinbe goes to check up on cocoyashi and leaves down a brother and up a daughter,' and the concept immediately possessed my stupid brain until i wrote it. so here i am, twenty-four hours, three thousand words and a lot of crying later. 
> 
> yes i will draw absolutely every available comparison between nami and koala and nobody can stop me. i think about them constantly.


End file.
